We were well aware that Novell had put itself on the market, coyly winking at passers-by, displaying its... Assets. VMware was a contender, but things have played out entirely different: Novell has been bought by Attachmate Corp., with a Microsoft-led consortium buying unspecified intellectual property from Novell.

They've already re-implemented a large portion of winforms etc... Christ...

well, yes, exactly so. This is indeed the crux of the matter. The Mono code includes open source implementations of Microsoft proprietary technologies such as winforms. We certainly agree on that.

The bit that you may not perhaps realise is that Microsoft wants to be paid for its proprietary technologies. It has even, of late, sought license fees for implementations of its technologies that Microsoft did not write. Going after Tom TOM for an implementation of FAT is a good example. Microsoft did not write the FAT filesystem code in the Linux kernel that TomTom were using (neither did TomTom, BTW), and the Linux kernel is released under an open source license. GPLv2 actually. None of that stopped Microsoft from persuing TomTom.

Winforms in Mono is a prime candidate to become another such a target. Microsoft will ask for money from companies who use Mono (it will probably not go after Mono developers).